ABSTRACT
David Mamet had already written numerous plays and screenplays before writing and directing the film House of Games, released in 1987. Like other drama coming out of the absurdist tradition (Beckett, Ionesco, Albee), Mamet’s works have a serious concern with theatrical and narrative structures, with semiotic systems and their generative and deconstructive impulses. Even though plays such as American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and Glengarry Glen Ross are known for their use of hard-hitting, vernacular language, they and especially House of Games take up many other textual issues beyond the ones raised by language alone. Based on the idea of a sting operation, House of Games subverts realism as we usually understand the genre by examining the functioning of the performative sign and continually forcing a retrospective reinterpretation of the “already played.” Exposing its own structure as the generation of a cinematic text out of intertexts, as well as out of writing and rewriting, interpreting and misinterpreting processes, the film demonstrates how the performative sign becomes ever more enmeshed in the artifice of hyperrealism.
