Men (5 page)

When in the film's tense climax Ford confronts Mike face-to-face, meting out justice at the end of a gun (Billy's gun, the one she'd taken off him earlier, in classic MacGuffin fashion), suddenly we're in a female revenge plot, an artier
I Spit on Your Grave.
But even after Ford plugs him with a bullet, Mike's not backing down from his diagnosis: that getting rooked was what she
wanted
. “Hey, fuck you,” he spits at her, wounded and bleeding. “You crooked bitch … you thief … you always need to get caught—'cause you know you're bad.… You sought this out.… I knew it the first time you came in. You're worthless, you know it. You're a whore.” (He pronounces it “hoor,” like an old-style gangster.) She tells him to beg for his life but, his own man to the end, he won't.
Bang, bang, bang
. She shoots him dead, while he writhes and twitches on the floor. But she's killed off the film's most charismatic character and you can't help disliking her for it—the screen just seems empty without Mike around.

The shooting temporarily evens the score—a brief moment of purifying revenge, with Ford finally refusing to play the dupe. But it's a hollow triumph—Mike
was
right all along, as we see in a sort of coda when Ford reappears, following a long vacation. She's transformed! Her hair has highlights, she's wearing something splashy and floral, dangly earrings grace her ears. When the newly feminized, lip-glossed doctor is asked to sign a copy of her book by a fan, she inscribes it, “Forgive yourself”—an earlier bit of advice from her mentor Maria, another female shrink. At the restaurant where she's meeting Maria for lunch, she surreptitiously boosts a fancy lighter from another woman's open purse, a small smile of satisfaction playing on her lips.

So … everything she'd been repressing—her femininity, her klepto tendencies—have been unleashed by blowing Mike away with a handgun? She finally knows who she is? This appears to be the conflicted logic of the denouement. On the one hand, killing Mike kills the messenger who'd delivered the painful self-knowledge about what a worthless crooked bitch she is; on the other, her newfound self-acceptance has miraculously cured her of whatever stick was up her ass. Yeah she's a crooked bitch, but she's okay with that.

*   *   *

Why does this movie enrage me so? (Why have I also watched it countless times?) Maybe because it's Mamet's little joke on brainy women everywhere: our instincts are shot—too much book learning has left us denatured and floundering, unable to survive in the real world (or the “real world” Mamet invents to bludgeon us with). When Ford finally gets a brutal self-education at the hands of the all-seeing con men, note that their instincts are pretty much infallible. Still, to the extent that Ford embodies all the arrogance of medical science, you're not crying crocodile tears for her as she gets herself rooked. She's kind of an asshole, swaggering around with her advanced degrees and hefty checking account—no problem walking out of a bank with eighty grand on demand, I noted with envy.

But the decks are also so stacked against her. The world of the con and the world of psychiatry would seem, at first glance, like entirely different enterprises, yet the sleight of hand
House of Games
pulls off is staging an epistemological contest between the two and conning us into buying it. Here, the con isn't just a criminal operation, it's a codified system of knowledge passed down through the generations; the con men are a
guild
, practicing and refining their technique. Indeed one of the pleasures of the movie is its lessons in the mechanics of various cons (“The Mitt,” “The Tap,” etc.), and learning how to scam people out of their money orders. We feel, like Ford, flattered to enter their world, and a little more wised up about the hazards awaiting the unwary.

The knowledge base of psychiatry isn't quite as romanticized, even though as interpretive methods go there's actually a curious similarity between them, at least in Mamet's conception. Consider the “tell”—as Mike explains it, it's a lot like what Freudians call a parapraxis (slips of the tongue, the pen, or other unconscious but “telling” behaviors). Except that here it's the con man who's expert at analyzing people's desires, not the clueless shrink. All Ford has are stupid theories out of books; she couldn't interpret her way out of a paper bag. Mike's knowledge is appealing and sexy; hers is antiseptic. He holds Margaret's hand and can tell which finger she's thinking of; later, when he propositions her, he knows what she
really
wants. “You're blushing. That's a tell. These things we want, we can do them or not do them, but we can't hide them.”

At least you can't hide them from Mike, the movie's epistemological hero. The film sets up an interesting philosophical tension between seeing and knowing, but it's a fixed race from the start. Ford sees, but she sees in useless ways, because she doesn't
know herself
; she doesn't know what her experiences mean. In each exchange, someone's withholding a crucial piece of information—namely, where she really fits into the story, which is as a mark. Not knowing her place makes her ridiculous.

But it's not the con men setting her up, it's the film that makes her a dupe. As it does us in the audience—we're dupes too. Or we're dupes as long as we know only what Ford knows, which leaves us languishing in the feminine boondocks along with her. When the “aha” moment finally comes—for us ahead of Ford—that she's been
had
, and everything she (and we) thought she'd done of her own volition (including bedding Mike) was scripted in advance by the all-knowing con men, at least we get to trade feminine ignorance for masculine competence, which comes as a relief, because who wants to be a sucker?

It's this fantasy of male infallibility that becomes a little annoying. Note that psychiatry and the con are gender-segregated spheres here: there are no female con artists; there are no male psychiatrists. The one other shrink we meet—Ford's mentor Maria—gives her the stupid advice to stop working so hard and go find some “joy”—“Do something that gives you satisfaction!” Look where
that
gets her. It's not only ways of knowing the world that are gendered in Mametland, it's epistemological competence overall. Here's a world, not so unlike our own, in which knowledge is power; but if only men are granted knowledge, women are natural born losers. To say this is a fabulously misogynistic film is an understatement, but it's a version of misogyny that's so pleasurable and cleverly orchestrated that I find myself loving every minute of it. (Then hating myself in the morning.)

Obviously Ford's fate worries me: I know how susceptible I am to having my intelligence flattered; at least it's worked often enough in the past. Would I have been able to hold out against a guy like Mike? Doubtful. You know he's no good—he practically has a sign on his forehead. But I bet Margaret isn't the only brainy female around to have been drawn to an overconfident guy with an edge of wrong. You want all my money? Let me write you a check. Make it out to cash? No problem. I once dated a gambler semi-briefly (it's possible there was later some recidivism). He knew the world of backroom games and their habitués, which seemed exotic to me; he had theories about reading the flop and when to play tight versus loose, skills I thought could prove useful in life, not that I play poker. At dinner one night he flashed a huge wad of cash, several inches thick; he'd been in a high stakes game the night before. I riffled through it—mostly hundreds. One side of me thought, “How crass,” but another side was thrilled. He had a shifty sort of charm and could calculate the odds of drawing to an inside straight off the top of his head. A lot of things he told me about himself didn't quite add up (including that he was pathologically honest), but I could overlook it.

It's what Ford overlooks about Mike that paves the path to catastrophe. But she looks into his eyes and feels recognized; she feels like he knows her secret places. Now, this is a perennially powerful idea in the female romantic imagination—the man who knows you inside and out. There's something thigh-tingling about it. Isn't it why women fall in love with their shrinks? Not because anything about them is actually so enticing (usually the reverse—they sit in armchairs all day and get big butts); it's the way they penetrate your inner life that's seductive, their knowledge of your soul and related organs. “And what is it you think I want?” Ford asks during the seduction scene. “What am I?” When Mike shows her that he knows what she desires, that he knows her
there
, it's the first time Ford registers as desirable—at least according to the conventions of female desirability that movies have attuned us to for the last century or so—because for the first time, she's
penetrable
.

The woman penetrated by a man's knowledge
is
a perennial movie motif; also why repressed neurotic females make such useful protagonists. It's no accident that Ford makes all those Freudian slips. Symptoms are a dialectic of the visible and the invisible: something is buried or repressed, and needs to be uncovered. As Mary Ann Doane explains in
The Desire to Desire,
discussing 1940s-era medical melodramas focused on the emotional and physical illnesses of female characters, this buried thing requires the appearance of another character: the revealer-of-what-is-hidden. Typically it's a male doctor or psychiatrist, summoned to cure the female lead by revealing some secret truth and, along the way, curing her resistance to her femininity.
House of Games
at least modernizes the contrivance: the repressed female is herself a shrink, and the surrogate shrink is a con man. And here the diagnosis isn't exactly a curative.
1

But it's something about Ford's repressed desires that makes her a mark: somehow these brilliant con men have discerned from her buttoned-up demeanor not only that what she
really
wants is to be spontaneous and wanton and fuck strangers in hotel rooms, but also that she'll fall for their rickety scam.
“Do you think you're immune from experience?”
demands one of her patients. Ford denies it, which is Mamet's clever little trap for her. If she's closed to experience, she's dried-up and frigid. But opening herself to experience gets her royally screwed. Either way she loses. I understand that Mamet isn't trying to represent the entirety of the female condition (at least I imagine he'd deny it if asked), and there's no reason to take the movie as some sort of parable or pronouncement, but if it resonated with me more than it should, and in ways that I really do completely fucking resent, I suppose it's because for women of my generation—post–sexual revolution, post–second wave feminism (third wave? fourth?)—erotic recklessness and going places you shouldn't was supposed to be our right if we chose to claim it. If we wanted to get in on some of that sexual adventurism guys have always taken for granted, whose business was it?

Except that here, going to the wrong side of town for thrills makes you into a dirty joke for a bunch of sniggering men. After she and Mike have sex and Ford steals the lighter from what she thinks is a stranger's bureau—well, it turns out it was Mike's, part of the set dressing concocted for her benefit. “The bitch boosted my lucky lighter,” Mike complains later on to the gang. Much jocularity and hooting: “The bitch is a booster,” one of them confirms. “The bitch is a born thief.” When they steal, it's business; when she steals, it's smutty, some variety of female perversion. “So you had her made from the jump,” someone congratulates him. More levity all around.
“Took her money and screwed her too.”

Hearing this rather blunt assessment is what spurs Ford to revenge. “You learned some things about yourself you'd rather not know,” Mike says brusquely later, when she's waving her gun at him. What she's meant to have learned is that you can only con people who want to be conned, people like her for whom being taken advantage of fulfills some subterranean yearning. That's Mike's credo anyway. Technically she hadn't even been conned, she'd sought out the chance to confirm her deepest pathologies. And she's sexually ridiculous to boot: “What are you gonna tell 'em, Stud?” he mocks her, when she threatens to go to the cops. I'm not sure which would be worse, losing eighty grand or being so ruthlessly diagnosed.

*   *   *

Reversing Billy's accusation that she doesn't “do dick,” Ford does what dicks do the world over: abuse power, even though it's only with Billy's gun that she acquires the requisite equipment. So, having taken care of business like so many beloved movie vigilantes before her, what's next for our score-settling heroine?

As in the classic medical melodrama denouements where the cured heroines blossom, getting pretty clothes and doing fancy things with their hair, she graduates into full-blown femininity. Having strolled into the House of Games thinking she could be one of the guys, she emerges by film's end cured of all feminine ambivalences.

So dead as he is, Mike wins the epistemological contest anyway. Sure he was a con man, but he's still the character most identified with truth in this movie; he may have lied for a living, but at least he wasn't lying to
himself
. Whereas Margaret … “You raped me,” she accuses Mike, waving her gun around. “You took me under false pretenses.” Really?

“You asked me what I did for a living, this is it,” he says jocularly, just before she plugs him with a bullet. But easy for him to say—
his
inner life was never under scrutiny;
his
sexuality was never penetrated by the movie's narrative apparatus. It's not diagnosing his sickness that's been the fulcrum of the story—not what cheating people gratified in him, or whether he was anxious about performing in bed with Ford.… From any evidence of his inner life or unconscious conflicts the film looks discreetly away.