The plot of Homicide hinges on a word. But between the beginning and the end of the film the word changes. ‘GROFAZ’ is a clue that police officer Bobby Gold finds on a strip of paper while prowling a rooftop in search of a sniper. Or at least there might have been a sniper, and he might have been taking shots at a Jewish family, one of whom, an old woman who ran a corner store in a poor black neighbourhood, has just been brutally killed.

“It never stops, does it? Against the Jews,” comments the old woman's granddaughter. But Officer Gold, himself a Jew, resists the idea of conspiracy, and anyway he has other professional matters on his mind. He and his colleagues, particularly his Irish partner, Sullivan, were in pursuit of a big black villain, until Gold stumbled on the cornershop shooting and was reassigned. He resents this, and being pushed into the company of these ‘rich Yids.’ (His captain tells him that they're his people; “I thought I was your people,” he replies.) To Gold, the disaster that has hit this family seems to spring, self-inflicted, from their own hermetic world. “Four thousand years of anti-Semitism—we must be doing something to cause it,” he tells Sullivan.

Yet as he pieces together more of the evidence, of the dead woman's involvement in gunrunning to Israel in 1946, of a list of others involved who might now be in danger too. Gold begins to feel the tug of a connection. He starts to follow the evidence as if it might constitute a personal map.

GROFAZ, he is told, is an acronym, a term used in Nazi propaganda towards the end of the war to refer to Hitler (“the Greatest Strategist of All Time”), that has now been adopted as the codeword for a new anti-Semitic organisation. He is persuaded to join the conspiracy against this conspiracy, only to find that it is impossible to belong both to these militant People of the Book and the forces of law and order. GROFAZ, in the end, cannot be substantiated; what can be is a brand of pigeon feed (we see a pigeon coop on the roof where Gold hunts the sniper) called ‘GROFAZT.’

Nothing is proved either way, of course: the anti-Semitic conspiracy might still exist. But in trying to prove it, Gold has let down his other ‘family,’ in particular Sullivan, who dies in a shoot-out with the villain they've been pursuing throughout. It's an ironic coda that is common to the cop movie, where the policeman's lot is often an impossible one and the course of justice never runs smooth.

In an interview in Time Out (1989), Mamet has stressed the genre sources of Homicide. “Traditionally, cop movies either picture them as stoics, which is to say as philosophers to whom nothing is more important in life than doing right—doing right as the utmost happiness—or the plot gives them some kind of personal reason for doing their job, like their partner gets killed or their family terrorised. I've used all these routines shamelessly.” Indeed he has, but he has strangely rerouted them: the usual personal, social or institutional pressures become more contained and emblematic: in the end his characters always play on a solipsistic stage and eventually gather its darkness into themselves.

One film that makes instructive comparison with Homicide is Don Siegel's Madigan, where the need for self-justification, the need, in cop-movie parlance, to be ‘the first one through the door,’ drives Richard Widmark's hero. But during the two days Madigan has to recover the police revolver he loses at the beginning, his story intertwines with other characters—up and down the police hierarchy, across the social scale—who face similar crises of self-confidence and lost honour. By the end, there's a certain irony about the theme, a certain wryness about Madigan's personal quest. His need is extended, shaded, qualified by all the other lives the film has touched on and incorporated as mini-themes. Madigan's existential crisis becomes everyone's, in a non-denominational, across-the-board way.

FROM LIGHT INTO DARKNESS

In Homicide, the undoing of Officer Gold seems a particularly cruel joke, and it's a derisive Mamet touch that it should be done through a play on words. It's this which distinguishes the film from other cop movies—the definition of character and situation, loyalties and conflicts, not through action (or even narrative in the usual sense) but through language—and it is a powerful membrane for holding individuals together. In the first part of Homicide, dialogue is a ritualistic exchange of catchphrases and complaints, abuse and reassurance, between the members of Gold's squad. But it's an elusive medium for an individual, like Gold, suddenly provoked to define who, exactly, he is. Visiting the bereaved family, he can't tell whether they're speaking Yiddish or Hebrew.

The verbal directness of this conflict certainly makes Homicide seem Mamet's most theatrical film to date. Eventually Gold is driven to answer the question people keep pushing at him with a speech in which he acknowledges that being a policeman, a member of one team, is linked to his negative feelings about being a member of another. Specifically, “They said I was a pussy because I was a Jew.” So Gold has compensated both by trying to seem tougher than anyone else (“All my life I got to be the first one through the door … because I'm nobody”), and by turning that sense of weakness, of being an outsider, into his role. Jewishness and being like a woman have qualified him to become the ‘mouthpiece’ of the squad, the hostage negotiator, “because I knew how the bad guys felt.”

The sense of theatre here comes not just from the flow of words but from the flow of words but from the dramatic movement and even the look of the film. This becomes increasingly stark, a drive from cause to effect, from scene to scene, that is cleaner and more clipped than one is used to in naturalistic crime films. (Compare, for instance, the dense narrative texture of Sidney Lumet's Q & A, which deals with a similar issue of institutionalised racism in the police force.) Gold is isolated between the two groups—Jews and police—in a situation where no narrative resolution, and not much elaboration, is possible. He must choose between his squad members and the Jewish activists who then ask for some proof of identity and allegiance. Gold is only too willing to prove it, because again his sense of identity is tied up with being obliging—“I want to help”—and he agrees to bomb a store which is a front for a neo-Nazi organisation and anti-Semitic printing house.

Or is it? The film raises doubts about the reality of what Gold discovers or is told by emphasising the sense of ‘theatre’ in another way—by giving many scenes a self-consciously staged look. When Gold enters the targeted premises, the scene is very neatly laid out: an antique printing machine in a back room, flanked by an American flag and a Nazi flag and backed by an enlarged photograph of a wartime atrocity. There are several possible interpretations. One is that Mamet's scene-setting is inevitably theatrical but thematically meaningless. Another is that Gold is being forced to enter a ‘theatre’ of the self by suddenly being confronted with what it means to be a Jew. And another is that the scene looks so stagy because he is being set up.

The ‘set-up,’ of course, is endemic to the Mamet plot, and not just because the milieu is usually that of criminals or con men. Underlying Mamet's treatment of language, behaviour, family ties and group loyalties is the sense that meanings are unstable and that, at base, they are games. And games are always being played more or less consciously to deceive. Most extensive and fascinating in this regard is House of Games itself. Mamet's first film, which revealed ever more complicated pieces of trickery, until they all coalesced into one master con reaching back to the beginning of the film. To what end the Jewish organisation in Homicide might be ensnaring and taking advantage of Officer Gold scarcely matters, since in Mamet's scheme of things to belong is both a need and a weakness. In this world of (virtually) all-male competitiveness, macho fears are both parodied and reinforced.

AND TWO WORLDS BECAME ONE

In an interview in City Limits (1987), at the time that he was making the transition to film director, Mamet was in no doubt that his new métier would be a change from the old. “Writing for the screen is completely different. You're basically trying to make up pictures and you only resort to dialogue when you can't make up the perfect picture. I think.” If this is true, then it would seem to be further proof that the three films Mamet has directed are theatre rather than film. The flow of words has continued unabated, and the catchphrases of the con men in House of Games become an ear-catching sing-song: “The man can't play, he should stay away”; “It happens to the best, it happens to the rest.” But it is also true that the cinema is quite accommodating to elements that are non-cinema, and that the stylisation of Mamet's dialogue may have resulted in a stylised cinema that, thematically, serves the same ends. It could even be said that Mamet's theatre was waiting to find its consummation in the cinema.

Mamet's language, of course, is what has made him famous, his ear for vernacular, or for language that has been coded for particular uses—by con men, hustlers, petty criminals, a psychotherapist and other trick cyclists. It is a language that has been invented to manipulate and deceive, and so it always has a certain formality, a delight in the parabolas by which characters get from A back to A. Words are pushed and shunted through speeches with an assertiveness, a concreteness, that often seems to give them a reality—an independent life—greater than anything they might be referring to.

But this is only to say that words contain their own reality: that they embody fictions and fantasies that are traded back and forth, in a world whose reality is always open to negotiation. Most peculiarly, the reality, concreteness or truthfulness of whatever is being said often seems self-consciously detached from whoever is saying it. The dialogue of Mamet's plays, on the page, is full of italics and quotation marks, even individual verbs and pronouns being given that questioning emphasis, as if to suggest that there's no statement so simple it can't be turned to mean something else, and that no one in this world would want, syntactically, to limit their options.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet's play about real-estate men, the possibility of stealing ‘leads’ (possible clients) from their own firm and selling them to another just sort of materialises between two salesmen: “Are you actually talking about this, or are we just …”; “No, we're just …”; “We're just ‘talking’ about it”; “We're just speaking about it. As an idea”: “We're not actually talking about it … as a robbery”; “As a ‘robbery’?! No,” The upshot of this is that what one man thinks of as an ‘abstract’ discussion, the other unilaterally decides to make ‘concrete,’ and claims his colleague as an accomplice in crime “because you listened.”

This slipperiness of language, the way in which it can even slip away from its user, easily inspires a cinematic ambiguity, a play of deceptive surfaces, of deliberately ‘rigged’ appearances, teasing the viewer to decode the unreality to discover whatever reality might lie beneath. Images don't have to replace words but can set further quotation marks round them, can do even more, in fact, to emphasise those separations—thoughts from actions, words from feelings, intentions from consequences—that are always Mamet's subject. In this respect, House of Games looks like a Hitchockian film, but one in which no Hitchcockian reference (kleptomaniac heroine notwithstanding) was intended. It's even conceivable that the film has gone one better than the Master.

An argument has been made (Film Quarterly, 1990) that House of Games is not only about the elaboration of a ‘master con’ but about the working through of the heroine's compulsions and their therapeutic resolution. In this view, the final scene at the airport, the least realistic in the film (and, by extension, the most Hitchockian in its levels of artifice), does not actually happen: that Dr Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) does not shoot her con man lover tormentor, but is simply completing a process of identification and projection in her mind, begun at the start of the film when she interviews a girl who has murdered an authority figure, her father.

But if this is true, then it is also possible that the therapeutic process reaches further back into the film, that it is an alternative narrative to the con man's game—a feminine alternative to the masculine one. The “House of Games,” in other words, is Dr Ford's invention, the staging ground for her therapy, ‘conceived’ in the first part of the film where she is forever writing. Her disconnected notes on the patient who leads her to the gambling den also have an obvious relevance to herself: “Compulsive succeeds in establishing a situation where he is out of control … The character of Mike—the ‘Unbeatable Gambler.’ Seen as omniscient, who ‘doles out punishment.’” Again, the quotation marks, and the use of the upper case, signal the separation of a character from herself, her actions and her understanding of herself. It's a separation that explains why Mamet has not adapted his theatrical world to the cinema, but has simply recreated one within the other.

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL

It is not surprising to discover that the games which are so important in Mamet's plays and films are also significant in the way he goes about his work. In his introduction to the published script of House of Games, he declares. “Gambling was endemic in the cast and crew. One sequence of the film is a poker game, and many of us, for the week that sequence took, spent twelve hours a day in a staged poker game and the remaining twelve in a real one.” By making a benign game of work. Mamet makes it possible to imagine all the malign consequences of game-playing in human behaviour.

But benign games may not be that far removed from malign ones. Or they may contain rather interesting thematic clues of their own. Mamet talks about the many on-set gags that were played on House of Games, whose object were “almost invariably Lindsay Crouse.” Of these his favourite was the ‘Spawning Salmon.’ “Crouse did a scene on a bench overlooking an embankment overlooking Elliott Bay. She's supposed to be staring out to sea, and we sent a production assistant down below the embankment. On cue he was to heave this ten-pound salmon up into the air, where it lands at her feet. You can see it on the Joke Reel, but Crouse is staring a few degrees off to the side, and concentrating on her acting, and she didn't actually see the salmon.” Something very like that salmon is the pigeon feed that ends up in the lap of Officer Gold at the end of Homicide.