ABSTRACT
David Mamet’s 1997 film The Edge portrays a series of literal and metaphorical descents that signify its hero’s achievement of self-knowledge through enlightenment. Mamet’s millionaire protagonist, Charles Morse (played by Anthony Hopkins), is an allegory of self that, as the film progresses, rejects false selfreflections it had once embraced, moving from an embodiment of corporeality to spirituality, from animality to enlightenment. Showing Charles in dialectical engagement with increasingly threatening reflections of the animal-self, Mamet constructs the protagonist’s experience as an allegory-in-process. The closer the hero comes to revealing his inner, animal nature the closer he comes to annihilating it, achieving the allegorical status of being and doing the self through the culminating action of auto-revelation, the slaying of the bear. Thus Mamet portrays a personal rite-of-passage that is both self-destructive and self-revelatory, putting forth the spiritual persona as the true one, the animal aspect as a blockage to it. While this metaphorical representation forms the film’s “inner self,” an outer layer of depiction illustrates Charles’s experience as wilderness-survival, as a trial that places him in violent confrontation with a man-killing bear and with his wife’s murderous lover, the photographer Bob (played by Alec Baldwin). Whereas the film’s inner representation signifies a philosophical and creative mode of being, the outer one mirrors a postmodern yet literalist worldview. The portrayal juxtaposes the two, demonstrating and imposing the enlightenment experience. It thereby constitutes a theatrical rite that, in its attempt to incorporate the spectator in the drama of the self, forms a figura of primal unity, of the original love-bond between self and Other.
