Hegemonic Masculinity and Blake's "Mission of Mercy": David Mamet's Cinematic Adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross as Postmodern Satire of Fundamentalist Christianity

This article explores the 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet’s 1983 satirical stage play Glengarry Glen Ross, particularly as the cinematic satire attacks the connections and similarities between fundamentalist Christianity and hegemonic masculinity. Since over a decade separates the stage play from the screen version, the writer employs an interdisciplinary American studies methodology that borrows from a variety of scholarship—history, literature, and religion—to argue that new insights can be gleaned by situating the cinematic adaptation amidst the rise of American fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity at the end of the 20th century. Through the addition of the screen character Blake (Alec Baldwin), who does not exist within the play and is not specifically identified by name within the film, the adaptation becomes an allegory for legalistic Christianity’s unique narrative of history. Blake’s overwhelming masculinity, as well as his sales success ultimatum, emphasizes the way both Christian fundamentalism and hegemonic masculinity rely upon binary definitions of faith and gender—Christian / non-Christian, masculine / feminine—respectively. In order to maintain an individual’s participation in both domains, there is no almost category: one either is Christian or masculine or one is not. As such, the film functions as a postmodern satire that simultaneously attacks both domains without proposing any new system(s) to replace the reductive binaries proposed therein.