“Always Be Closing.”
If there’s a scene everyone remembers from Glengarry Glen Ross, it’s undoubtedly the one where Blake (Alec Baldwin) briefly materialises to terrorise the jaded salesman of Premiere Properties.
For my money, this is not the most unsettling scene in James Foley’s 1992 movie.
There is a moment that I’m reminded of much more frequently, usually when I find myself confronted by the absurdities of modern life.
The scene that chills me the most is the one in which Shelley Levene (a downtrodden and desperate character played by Jack Lemmon) places a phone call to a customer. The implications of this exchange can only be understood in retrospect.
It’s a conversation loaded with perverse incentives and conflicting goals: an interaction so lacking in real connection that the participants may as well be a couple of competing chatbots.
“Coffee’s for closers only”
Directed by James Foley, Glengarry Glen Ross is an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play by David Mamet, one of the greats of contemporary American drama.
The movie covers a couple of days in the lives of four duplicitous salesmen. Their task: to flog worthless real estate, using equally worthless customer leads, in the hope that they can retain their jobs and thereby secure better customer leads.
Famously, this takes the form of a literal sales contest, after which the two least successful employees will be fired.
Shelley Levene (Lemon) is one of those weary salesmen. After receiving his assignment, he escapes an unrelenting evening downpour with the goal of booking a house call to one of his allocated customer leads, Bruce and Harriett Nyborg.
In contrast to his desperate straits and shabby appearance, Levene’s sales patter exudes warm, gentlemanly confidence.
He presents himself as a highly successful businessman, about to leave town but making a last-minute call from his office. Really, he would be doing the Nyborgs a favour if he squeezed in a visit to award them their ‘prize.’
Too good to be true
To embellish the illusion, Levene draws the phone receiver away from his mouth and shouts orders to an imaginary secretary, Grace.
Grace? Gonna need a first-class seat, uh… passport, ten-thousand in cash – put that with the negotiable papers, if you would – and put me on the telex hook up…
The audience saw him pull this trick during an earlier call at the Premiere Properties office. But in this new context the ruse seems more sad and surreal.
Levene’s high-roller act is persuasive enough to secure an appointment. Offscreen, he meets with the Nyborgs and secures a stunning sale: $82,000 for eight units.
In the light of Levene’s prolonged slump, this represents an impressive turnaround. It almost beggars belief.
We soon learn that all is not what it seems. In fact nothing we witnessed in the phone booth is real – from ‘Grace’ through to the circumstances of the sale.
At the film’s conclusion, we discover that Levene’s customers, Bruce and Harrie Nyborg, are delusional and that their cheque is therefore worthless. “The people are insane,” scoffs John Williamson, the office manager played by Kevin Spacey. “They just like talking to salesmen.”
Armed with the knowledge that the Nyborgs are actually lunatics, the viewer can fully appreciate the forlorn absurdity of the phone booth scene.
We witnessed a man:
- pretending to converse with a non-existent secretary
- in a non-existent office
- in order to sell worthless land tracts
- to people who have no grasp on reality.
Sinclair’s Law
Levene could be spending time with his seriously ill daughter. Instead he’s wasting his evening pantomiming to an empty auditorium. Why can’t he see this?
There’s a strong suggestion that Shelley is so locked into the pursuit of his sales target – and the dream of paying off his daughter’s medical bills – that he’s lost track of reality.
“They’re nuts,” Williamson points out. “They used to call in every week. Did you see how they were living? How can you delude yourself?”
As Upton Sinclair famously observed. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Shelley was operating on autopilot, so fixated on his primary task that he overlooked the squalor of the Nyborg residence.
Pause for a moment to consider this, though: Williamson apparently knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Nyborg lead was a wild goose chase. He still assigned that lead card to Shelley.
Surviving on powdered milk
It’s possible that Williamson’s negligence was motivated by his breathtaking contempt for Levene. It seems equally possible that he gave out the lead simply because he’s the office manager, and giving out leads is what an office manager does.
“I do what I’m hired to do,” he reasons. “I don’t make the rules; the rules come from downtown.”
Williamson’s salary depends on him not understanding that the leads are weak
Williamson’s role means sticking to the party line – that the problem with his office isn’t the quality of the leads, but the quality of the salesforce – in defiance of any contradicting evidence.
The meagre leads do appear to be as stale as the salesmen claim they are. Williamson’s salary depends on him not understanding that fact.
So he continues to go through the motions of circulating the same worthless and well-thumbed lead cards, even when it would save everybody time and energy if he just skipped the process altogether.
In a conventional sales environment, that barren Nyborg lead would be retained purely to make up the numbers – a cutting agent used to bulk out the sales plan.
In the reductio ad absurdum world of Glengarry Glen Ross, it is literally all that Levene is left with; it’s powdered milk in place of cocaine.
Sympathy for the salesman
Shelley Levene is rarely a sympathetic character: he can be wheedling, vengeful, and pompous. Ultimately he conspires to steal and sell the company’s high-value leads to a competitor, and he pays a heavy price for it.
But when we take a moment to consider the impossible personal and professional pressures of his situation, it is difficult not to feel compassion for him as he tries to game his way toward success. After all, he doesn’t make the rules, the rules come from downtown.
In this light, Levene’s smaller moments of chicanery soften into something more pitiable and relatable. Lemmon’s seminal performance only increases the sense of pathos.
The phone box scene is a chastening reminder that, when we’re truly desperate, few among us are above faking it just to make it through the day. In our most desperate moments we may find we have nothing left to cling to, except Grace.
