Exposing the Downside of the American Dream. Upward Social Mobility, Crime, and Questionable (Business) Ethics in Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and Stone's 'Wall Street'

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: This paper argues that both David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' - despite their entirely different settings in a brokerage firm and a real estate office - are connected by their fierce criticism of American business in the 1980s. Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' could hardly have been released at a more suitable time than in December 1987 - two months after the stock market crash also known as Black Monday occurred. It is this coincidence that made Stone's film, whose filming had already finished in July, almost prophetic in that it forecast the negative results of greed, even though 'Wall Street' does not end with a stock market crash. David Mamet's play 'Glengarry Glen Ross', on the other hand, was less closely linked to current events when it premiered in 1983, but it certainly paints a similarly gloomy picture of the business world.