Directing the Spectator

DIRECTING THE SPECTATOR: AUTHOR/AUDIENCE RELATIONS IN DAVID MAMET'S OLEANNA AND HOUSE OF GAMES JAMES KELLY GULDI A thesis presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts Stetson University May 1995 STETSON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE DIVISION This Thesis by James Kelly Guldi Is approved as meeting the research requirement of the Department of English for the degree of Master of Arts by Ujfh 0 frofe!ofesso r of English \<mVt-^ Professor o^English Accepted for the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences: D&e 315541 the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Barthes 226) ™T Theatrical events are necessarily social constructs. As Jerzy Grotowski indicates, "at least one spectator is needed to make it a performance" (in Bennett 1). Artistic production in theater takes place in performance; thus, production of meaning depends upon the collaboration of all those involved-author, actors and audience. The author must consider the spectators when writing a text that will ultimately be performed before them. Susan Bennett explains, "The playwright invariably shapes a text and the director invariably shapes a production to provoke particular expectations and responses within an audience" (20). While each writer and director allows a different degree of participation from them, David Mamet depends heavily upon the complicity of the audience in theatrical production. To better describe his particular techniques of provoking "expectations and responses" in them, it is necessary to explain contemporary understanding of techniques of reading texts. In "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach", Wolfgang Iser presents Roman Ingarden's theories of intentional sentence correlatives, which "remain only 'component parts'-they are not the sum total of the text itself' (Iser 128). The reader's imagination produces the text. Iser explains: If one regards the sentence sequence as a continual flow, this implies that the anticipation aroused by one sentence will generally be realized by the next, and the frustration of one's expectations will arouse feelings of exasperation. And yet literary texts are full of unexpected twists and turns, and frustration of expectations.... Indeed, it is only through the inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamicism. Thus, whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty of establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself. (130-3) Iser declares that all texts do this, but argues that "modern texts frequently exploit it quite deliberately. They are often so fragmentary that one's attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search for connections between the fragments." The intention is not merely to confuse the reader, but "to make us aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links" (131), Among the modern texts that operate in this manner are the works of Joyce, Wool£ Hemingway, and, I argue, to an even greater extent, the diverse body of work collectively know as the Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin, in his seminal text cataloguing and explaining the movement, refers to a production of Waiting for Godot in the San Quentin penitentiary. He quotes an article by an inmate: "It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors" (Absurd 2). Samuel Beckett's play launched a new effort by playwrights to exploit the possibilities hinted at by Iser and Ingarden. Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and many others followed suit by making the audience a character in the drama, producing them as subject. This is not the only project the absurdists set upon. Esslin describes how "the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought." It "has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being—that is in terms of concrete stage images" (6) Finally, it "tends to a radical devaluation of language,. what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters" (7). These projects, though, are all subsumed under the author's intention to stimulate the audience into activity. The performances of early absurdist plays often shocked audiences by completely skewing their expectations. Bennett notes that "at first audiences were unaccustomed to Beckettian theatre practice and responses were ... at best confused. But certainly after Martin Esslin's publication of The Theatre of the Absurd(1961) and, more importantly, the opportunity to see more such plays, this theatre practice became familiar and thus generally expected from playwrights like Beckett and Pinter" (50). Gradually, the rejection of expectations, the sense of the senselessness of the human condition, and the devaluation of language have come to comprise the natural expectations of audiences. These characteristics of modern theater provide the pretext for new plays by the time Mamet begins to write. The way Mamet (who writes and directs for both stage and screen) provokes expectations and responses depends partly on the medium in which he works. Performance in the theater commands a different relationship with the audience than showing a film in a movie house. Esslin describes that "stage drama, being 'five', has the excitement of spontaneity, however well- rehearsed it may be, and it has—this is its main asset as against any mechanically reproduced drama—the feed-back from the audience to the actors ..." (Anatomy 78). He continues by comparing that the most essential difference between the stage and all three mechanical media lies elsewhere: the camera and the microphone are extensions of the director, his eye and ear; they enable him to choose his point of view (or hearing) and to move the audience there by varying long-shots and close-ups, by cutting from one face, one locale, to another at will. (79) Mamet capitalizes on these differences in two specific works—in the film, House of Games, and the play, Oleanna. hi House of Games, he crafts the point of view of the audience by tying them to the protagonist. He forces the audience to fill gaps in the text that are being filled simultaneously by the protagonist. The audience is actively engaged in production, but not to the extent of producing a wildly different story from the protagonist. Near the end of the film Mamet severs the audience from the protagonist and allows, even encourages, them to deconstruct the final scenes and apply their own conclusions. In Oleanna. the audience is actively engaged in making meaning synchronically with the characters on stage, but with a wider scope of perception than in the film They are not harnessed to one character's point of view—all parties (characters and spectators alike) witness the gaps in the text. As production of connections differs between individuals, the audience chooses how to view the actions of the characters and how to privilege what they see. In Mamet's work, what the audience sees is more often a function of what they want to see than anything explicit that Mamet shows them. By encouraging the audience to engage in the production of meaning, Mamet divorces himself to a degree, from responsibility for the constructed meanings. This has caused him some criticism, both as writer and director, from those who fail to account for their personal additions to what Mamet shows them. For this reason, the present discussion of House of Games and Oleanna undertakes to examine the structural function of Mamet's work, especially the theatrical and filmic techniques he employs to produce the audience as subject, and to explore the effect of that structure in criticism of the texts. "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?" demands Mamet's protagonist, in House of Games (53). Margaret Ford voices a question that haunts the audience as both try to discover what the con- men have in store for them. In House of Games, the question comes at a time when Ford has just been involved with what seemed to be a con-gone-bad. She demands some assurance from the con-men that all will be explained; she insists on meaning. But by asking the question, by trying to fill in the gaps, she invites the production of a meaning that might put her in jeopardy (in fact, she does end up losing thousands of dollars to them). In watching the film, the audience is lured into asking the same question; and by trying to make meaning out of seemingly uninflected incidents, they risk similar dangers. While the audience may recognize the menace implicit in the con-men, they likely fail to discern their equal vulnerability to the film director. As a director, Mamet relies on what Iser calls our ability as readers "to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself' (130-1). Mamet believes that "the rules of dramatic structure ... are based on the rules of human perception" (Words 135). "Because we need to make sense of the world," he tells us, "it is the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into a story" (Directing 61). In Mamet's films, the connection between unrelated images is necessarily produced by the spectator, even while their arrangement is produced by the director. The shots are not inherently meaningful. They only have meaning as they are endowed by the audience.

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